alt Hacker NewsI suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.
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> In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears,
where I am the water is a part of it, but a big issue is electricity prices going up (which they will)
What exactly are you getting at? Datacenters do use potable water from municipal sources for evaporative cooling. Are you claiming that's not true?
Here's a recent source: https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-cente...
There is a methodical issue with that study that the authors acknowledge.
> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints
I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval...
People should stop citing that paper. It makes the opposite point they think it makes. I think most people just read the first couple of sentences in the abstract.
"We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach."
But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time.
"We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
There it is.
>your evidence for increasing energy prices
it's my power bill, dude. and everyone else's around me. your paper stops measuring that data right at the time when everyone's bills started increasing sharply.
2015 to 2024...?
Monthly private spending on data center construction:
2015: $168 million
2024: $1.59 billion
10x increase over 9 years (26% annual growth rate)
2026: $4.36 billion
3x increase over 2 years (73% annual growth rate)
Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending.
Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument.
The 2015 - 2024 growth curve would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper.
The latter growth (which is obviously accelerating), especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy.
So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.